<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2017 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'I still don&apos;t have my bicycle.',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2017/09/20.jpg" alt="A pink and orange flower behind a chain link fence" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		After finishing my coursework that was due today, I headed out to try the spare key on my malfunctioning bike lock.
		A couple neighbours caught me and wanted to talk.
		I really didn&apos;t have time for that!
		I was hoping to also make a trip to the second-hand store, but after our chat, there was no time before work.
		One of the two had told me before that they didn&apos;t think the couch on my porch was leather, but they aren&apos;t in good enough shape to climb stairs, so they couldn&apos;t come take a closer look at it to be sure.
		I said I&apos;d bring it down to them when I had time because I needed to know, but they said they&apos;d send someone else that can tell up to check.
		That&apos;s been a while though; it happened some time before my mother invited herself into my home.
		I gave up waiting, but didn&apos;t have time to act until the day before yesterday.
		Or maybe it was yesterday.
		Days blur together for me, especially when I&apos;m under a lot of stress.
		Anyway, I was informed that the couch wasn&apos;t leather, but fabric, so I need to haul it back up and store it on end with my other couches when I have the time.
		Today, that neighbour was telling me I didn&apos;t need to haul it down because they&apos;d send someone up, and I explained that I am on a deadline and no one&apos;d been sent up for quite a while.
		I mean, I need that all put away to get my mother in here.
		They apologised, saying that they haven&apos;t been outside much to see anyone to send, nor had they been out to really see me much, because their diabetic cat is dying.
		That must be hard.
		I&apos;m under a lot of stress, but at least no one&apos;s dying on me.
		I said I hadn&apos;t been out much either, and explained my recent rash of bad luck.
		Every time one problem is cleared up, another problem springs up.
		I can trace this chain of bad luck to at least the festival, though it might have started earlier than that.
		The two of them said they&apos;d pray for me, but I said I don&apos;t think Yahweh helps atheists.
		They insisted he does, so I said I still wasn&apos;t sure it&apos;d do any good, seeing how much Yahweh seems to hate gays such as myself.
		Again, they insisted it doesn&apos;t matter and that Yahweh loves everyone, including us gays.
		Still, seeing as I believe Yahweh to be a mythical creature, not an actual being, it&apos;s not like their argument was going to convince me of anything meaningful.
	</p>
	<p>
		I got to Fred Meyer, and as I feared, I couldn&apos;t jiggle the lock loose with the spare key either.
		I went into the store, pretending to look for something I could use to try to free my bike, but of course there wouldn&apos;t be anything.
		Really, I just wanted to talk to a friend that works there about my situation, as my bad luck is finally starting to get me down.
		I didn&apos;t expect anything useful from them, but they actually had an idea.
		They said I should talk to the police and ask what they&apos;d recommend doing in my situation.
		Huh.
		Well, it can&apos;t hurt to try.
		I&apos;ll hit up the police department when I have time and ask if they have any advice.
		I have mixed feelings as to whether I think they&apos;ll actually <strong>*have*</strong> advice though.
	</p>
	<p>
		As I walked to work, something occurred to me.
		I&apos;ve been having terrible luck since I left the pride festival, if not earlier.
		I&apos;ve been coming to terms with being gay, and around the time of the festival is when I stopped trying to fight it.
		Now, I don&apos;t believe in mythical creatures such as deities.
		However, if I did, I&apos;d take this as a sign Yahweh really does hate me for accepting my gayness instead of fighting it harder.
		If Yahweh really did exist and was on my side, I&apos;m not sure why I&apos;d be having such terrible luck with this particular timing.
	</p>
	<p>
		At work, a coworker said I should never become straight, because girls are the worst.
		Huh.
		That thought never occurred to me.
		I can&apos;t be straight even if I tried.
		I mean, I couldn&apos;t make myself asexual again, because I can&apos;t seem to kill off my same-sex attractions.
		Likewise, I couldn&apos;t become bisexual, as I couldn&apos;t dig up any opposite-sex attractions.
		To become straight, I&apos;d have to do two things that I can&apos;t seem to even accomplish separately, let alone together.
		And then, even if I managed to pull it off, what would even be the point?
		What&apos;s so good about being straight?
		It&apos;s not like I actually have a choice though.
		Sexuality can be fluid, and there&apos;s a chance I might one day be straight, but if that ever happens, it won&apos;t be something I can opt in or out of.
		I doubt it&apos;ll ever happen though; I&apos;m way too gay for that.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I finished up the discussion assignments:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			With how poorly-built most websites are these days, I wouldn&apos;t expect trending design characteristics to actually hold much value.
			However, almost every piece of trending design advice you offered is something I very much agree with.
			The one part I didn&apos;t agree with was the use of creative fonts, but then again, I like fonts to be much simpler than most people.
			Until my most recent browser upgrade, which messed with my long-time-held settings, I had my browser set to display all pages in Monospace, regardless of the display font intended by the Web developer.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You mentioned the importance of usability.
			It&apos;s also important to note that usability should mean usability for <strong>*all*</strong>.
			In other words, if a website isn&apos;t usable by blind people or people with text-based Web browsers, it&apos;s not actually a very usable website.
			This trait of being usable by everyone is known as &quot;accessibility&quot;.
			No matter who you are, you should always try to make your websites accessible, but in some countries, this isn&apos;t just good advice; it&apos;s the law.
			Companies can be sued for not making their websites accessible.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I like your idea of making sure every page can be reached within three clicks.
			I might try to build a check for that into my website-compilation scripts when I have time.
			That way, if content is too far out of reach, the compilation script will let me know so I can fix it.
			I&apos;m already planning to build some other automated tests into the script, but I haven&apos;t had the time to implement some of those ideas just yet.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Your comparison to a human brain is a good analogy.
			The human brain doesn&apos;t switch processes so quickly, but it does drift between problems in order to solve pieces of each before necessarily finishing with any particular problem first.
			Sometimes new, more urgent problems are presented to us, and we have to put all other problems aside for a while.
			Even when that doesn&apos;t happen though, it often helps to think about things later and work on other problems in the mean time.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You mention that the operating system can provide more time to an application that&apos;s trying to run more often, but I think the reverse could be true as well.
			The program that runs less often might be given priority over the process that runs frequently; otherwise, the less-frequent application might not get a chance to run at all.
			The less-frequent program is being less of a resource hog.
			Hopefully, the operating system can distinguish between times that the less-frequent and more-frequent applications should be given priority and act accordingly.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Another nice aspect of multitasking in computers is the option to run one task after another without a human needing to be there to start the second (or third, et cetera) task when the first completes.
			This is because a sort of meta-task can be set up.
			The meta-task then starts the first task and waits for it to complete.
			Then it starts the next task and so on.
			Depending on the tasks, these could be run using regular multitasking to complete them all at once, but it&apos;s worth noting that not even a basic task queue was possible before multitasking was invented.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		With only two days to plan, I wasn&apos;t sure what I wanted to do about the required images for my website submission.
		I&apos;d thought about $a[CD] covers, but those of course didn&apos;t fit with the &quot;Wix is no place for serious websites or serious Web developers&quot; theme of the site.
		I also considered screenshots of code of various types or cats generated by the Pepper&amp;Carrot avatar generator.
		I even took four of the five needed screenshots before deciding against that particular idea.
		Instead, I&apos;m going with random photographs.
		My mobile&apos;s battery was nearly dead yesterday though, so I powered it down.
		I hadn&apos;t considered that I&apos;d need my camera, so it took some time to charge it.
		Meanwhile, I worked on my other coursework and left the website alone.
	</p>
	<p>
		I had the website assignment just about complete when I jostled my hard drive.
		I still haven&apos;t put the bottom panel of the laptop back on, so the hard drive was a bit loose.
		I lost almost the entire thing, at least online.
		I have the local copy of all my text, but there&apos;s no way to back up and restore the site built with the obtuse Wix interface, so it is just gone.
		I had to go back and build it all again, wasting a couple hours&apos; worth of work.
		It was quicker to rebuild it than it&apos;d been to build it the first time, but it still cost me about an hour of extra time that I didn&apos;t really have to spare today.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
